Newton da Costa

Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa, who lived from September 16, 1929 to April 16, 2024, was a Brazilian mathematician, logician and philosopher born in Curitiba, Parana, renowned as a pioneer of paraconsistent logic, a system of logic tolerating certain contradictions without collapsing into triviality. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Parana and earned his doctorate in 1961 with a dissertation on topological spaces and continuous functions, going on to construct a quasi truth theory generalizing Alfred Tarski's account of truth and applying it to the foundations of science, while his broader research spanned model theory, Galois theory, the axiomatization of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, complexity theory, and philosophy of logic and of science. He served as president of the Brazilian Association of Logic and directed the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Sao Paulo, earning numerous international honors before his death at age ninety four.